A little Batty

[Matt Evans]

If you are anything like me, you're cheap. Or broke. Or any combination of the terms, depending on who is talking about you.

So, when you need a mallet at 2 pm, and can't stand thinking about taking the time to go to the hardware store, dishing out the measly 6 bucks, and don't really want to spend much more time than the drive would take chopping mortices or turning a really nice one on the lathe, you go this route. . .

Take a baseball bat handle that you have propping your widow open, turn a round tenon on it , grab the chunk of maple firewood you were attempting to use as a mallet, drill hole, thread maple and bat handle, and voila! 5-7 minutes spent, and out not a dime. . .

...Not much of a post, and there is going to be a follow up with real items and such, but this does get daily use, and has for the past four months. I cant say its the best mallet I ever had, but dang it, it drives a center punch, letter and number punches and, most importantly, the centers for my lathe, without getting dings in my carving mallets.

[Steve Sharp]

Like the ingenuity. Question tho, why the threads/rings around the top of your handle?

[Matt Evans]

Steve,
I turned the tenon on the handle a bit long, and just never have gotten around to spending the 15 seconds to cut the extra length off. The hadle threads on to the the head, which seemed the quickest way to do it at the time. (since the threading kit was in reach and the saw I would have used to cut a wedge was 15 ft away.)

[Pat Barry]

Nice idea - just thinking you could have used the barrel of the bat for the mallet too.

[Matt Evans]

Pat. . . I could have, but all the mallet head would have been was splinters then. . .

[Carl Babel]

Gotta appreciate that: built in moments, providing service for a lifetime.

Maybe more - I can easily imagine that mallet getting passed along to your progeny (maybe with a new head).
Yup, I can hear it now: "Not only did my granddad make this in under 60 seconds, but it's the very same bat he used to hit that grand-slam when he won the World Series!"